Venture Voice – interviews with entrepreneurs

Mark Cuban has built and sold more than one company and invested in plenty of others, but you might be surprised to learn that what he values most is something a lot of entrepreneurs find much more e…

Today’s media executives plotting to charge for their content would do well to hear how Larry Kramer beat Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com by resisting pressure to put most content behind a pay wall wh…

Any shareholder in a startup can tell you there’s a big difference between paper wealth and cash. Short of an IPO or outright acquisition, there are few options to cash out for the shareholders o…

“Dial 1 for sales, dial 2 for support…” Ten years ago it cost over $10,000 to get a phone system with the advanced options we’re used to hearing when we call big companies. Having a professional-…

Craigslist seems unbeatable. It’s often blamed (or celebrated) for destroying the classifieds business that helped keep American newspapers afloat. Now second-time Venture Voice guest Fabrice Gri…

Joel Spolsky first came on Venture Voice over three years ago to discuss his company which he launched in a very different way from most entrepreneurs. Rather than start with the big idea and pay…

Graham Hill started the blog TreeHugger to cover green issues in 2003. After a steady climb in traffic and advertising, Graham sold the company to Discovery Communications in 2007 for $10 million…

It takes only a few seconds to customize a radio station on Pandora. Its founder Tim Westergren has been struggling for almost a decade to make it that way. Pandora was five years in the making b…

The title financier conjures images of mahogany desks and million dollar checks for most. But for anyone pitching to David Cohen’s TechStars, the outcome is getting accepted to what’s essentially…

Not to be called a one trick pony, Sam Wyly’s turned himself into a billionaire by starting and growing companies in technology, oil, retail and even in the restaurant industry. Coming from a mod…

Jeff Stewart needed that done yesterday. Jeff became an entrepreneur when he founded the web consultancy Square Earth in 1995. Only three years later he became a serial entrepreneur by starting M…

Last time Derek Sivers was on Venture Voice three years ago he told us he had to “whack ’em [investors] off with a stick”. Now we know why. Derek announces on our show for the first time the amo…

Attention entrepreneurs dealing with the current economic downturn: This interview is for you. After working as a journalist for Jason Calacanis at Silicon Alley Reporter, Rafat Ali ended up brok…

Whether working with market trends or against them, Frank Addante has found entrepreneurial success. Before he was 29 years old, one of Frank’s companies went public and two were acquired. At his…

The name Tom Perkins is now almost synonymous with venture capital, but it’s clear that he cut his teeth as an entrepreneur. Educated at MIT and Harvard, Perkins first made his mark by managing t…

Jeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, a site where users can write and share reviews of local businesses. Everyone’s now a restaurant critic. However, local reviews were not the or…

Not many entrepreneurs have a motor like Kevin Ryan’s. Kevin is best known for his work as CEO at the on-line advertising firm DoubleClick, which he grew from a 20 person start-up to the largest …

Marketing a startup is tricky business. Every entrepreneur faces the dilemma between allocating time to improving the product and marketing the product. If the two can be mixed just right, then p…

Before the rise of the Internet, cable TV was the new form of distribution remaking the entertainment business. Life-long entrepreneur and former jazz producer Fred Seibert pioneered that field, …